Rise of the Machine

This and That

Here is my first post about my first computer. It was first published in 2015. In response to the post from This, That and the Other Thing’s prompt today. Here we go!

SOMETIMES

Back in 1983 my life changed when a shiny, very high-tekky, computer showed up on my doorstep. Well, I admit someone must have put it there, but for me… sigh… love at first sight!

It was a KayproII, a one-piece wonder that had its keyboard tucked up and buckled in against the monitor. There were two 5 1/4″ floppy disk drives: A and B. The A drive held the operating system, mysteriously known as CP/M, which took up part of the disk which also held what we would now call “content”; the B drive was for disk files. There were several manuals, mostly written in some completely foreign dialect resembling English but with words I had never seen before. To be fair, there were a few sections of one of the manuals that hinted at how to operate the computer. Very few. There was also a collection of programs, (soft…

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Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Coming for Our Content

This and That

I see the Reblog button, and will take the liberty to post this article to my blog, SOMETIMES, Looking forward to the series on AI. This must be serendipity at work, my daughter and I have long been into AI, and will find your series very interesting. Thank you.

As technology advances, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for content creation, from news articles to video highlights. This trend could have significant consequences for the content industry, including journalists and editors. On one hand, it may lead to more efficient processes and more accurate reports, while on the other, it could impact job security and the quality of content.

In this series of blog posts, I will explore the current state of AI-enabled content creation, the potential implications of these trends, and how the industry

The Long and Short Stories of Life

If you’re a blogger, Artificial Intelligence is scouring the internet, searching for content ideas, and borrowing content from your blog and mine. According to a Pro Blogger Newsletter, AI blogging software can perform tasks, “… such as optimizing blog posts for search engines, finding content ideas, and curating content from other sources.” 

That means busy bloggers are programing their AI software to look for your ideas and put them into a hodgepodge of thoughts to create a new blog post.

Until now, I thought AI was far into the future and its arrival, when it happened, would affect companies, technology, and space travel—not writers. I’ve written about artificial intelligence in my books and it’s throughout my stories. My characters have AI chips implanted in their brains, but that was supposed to happen in 2050 or 60.

There’ve been a lot of questions about AI eliminating human writers, but the question remains…

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oh oh…adult content ahead, proceed carefully.

This and That

OK, ©BUTTERBALL TURKEYS and whoever wraps them up in the heavy duty plastic:

Yes, I have a complaint, and I thought about taking a photo so ya’ll would know what I am talking about. But then I felt bad because as interesting as the photo would have been, it probably would have gotten me arrested. Picture this: a giant turkey, ready to throw in the roaster, shed of its plasic and mesh, and all its little packets of giblets and liver and other turkey parts, finally stripped down to its bare skin.

A NAKED TURKEY, with no head, no feet, and no feathers. It weighed in at just less than 20 pounds. The inside cavity, all locked in with the turkey legs held in place with the turkey’s tail … um, neck…sticking up out of the cavity several inches.

Now I hasten to point out that I am no prude. I admit that my husband and I would have gotten a huge laugh out of this turkey’s NECK, even more than we ever did when the neck was fully enclosed inside the bird, and was not free until said (butt cover) was cut or otherwise moved aside to let go the legs.

However…I couldn’t deal with releasing the legs, and etc., yank the neck out because it was still frozen inside and held in place with ice. So I had to call on my SON to extract the cavity contents. How embarrassing! Son’s lack of remarks about the turkey situation is much appreciated.

YES, it was THAT BAD! Anyone who has ever dealt with preparing a Thanksgiving Turkey can appreciate the experience. I was able to cope partly because I have “dealt with” dead turkeys for 60 years or so, and also because one of my first jobs as a young teenager was working at a Big Chicken Farm, on an assembly line where I was required to remove all of the guts from the chickens. GROSS.

I may or may not mention the incident to Aldi’s, I wonder if this turkey had an isolated packer…or if the shipment included a similar sight for customers. There is NO chance that this was an accident. None whatsoever. Someone at ©BUTTERBALL no doubt thought it was hilarious.

ya know what bugs me? (yah, that too…)

This and That

I wish the “media” et al would stop using the description “Gunman” in headlines about those jerks that insist on shooting up other people. I always think of a “Gunman” as Jesse James, or Wyatt Earp, or my personal favorite Tennessee Jeb. The term always sounds like something cool: heroic, dashing, macho…glamorous, exciting, sexy…

I have some suggestions for more accurate names:

PipSqueak with a Gun

Asshat aka assh.le with a gun.

Idiot with a rifle?

Total Asinine Jerk with an Automatic Rifle

Fool With a Gun

Yes, INSULTS instead of some kind of badge of honor.

Back in the day, way back, the Pilgrims had “stocks” in the town square, where perpetrators of various wrong-doers were literally locked in restraining wooden gadgets that limited movement. Their peers, or other detractors were not only permitted to tease and annoy these “criminals” but encouraged to throw things (rotten fruit) and heap ridicule on them. Laugh at them. Drag younger kids who hadn’t yet matured to the point of “earning” time in the stocks to stare at them as examples of what mischief resulted from misadventures.

Shooting people with ANY weapon—from BB-guns or water pistols or the like—is not something to joke about.

But please—stop referring to them as “gunmen.”

my spelling seems to be heading south

This and That

One of my unsung skills, to my mind, has always been my ability to spell English words. So I knew I was slipping this morning when I tried to use coyote, and mediocre in a sentence. (Actually it was two different sentences.)

I usually lose my WordPress post-in-progress when I try to access my dictionary link, so I keep a variety of old-fashioned paper dictionaries handy. So when I had difficulty with spell-check accepting my version of the two common words , and my paper Merriam-Webster wasn’t cooperating either, I knew I was in trouble.

When I find errors in old posts I always go back and edit out any errors. Usually these mistakes are typos, or technical glitches, occasional auto-fill spellings, but there are also the inevitable brain-errors which have official names that I learned 80-odd years ago in elementary school but have not worried about since. I always took to spelling and grammar details as a part of my affinity for writing, I guess.

Now, the automatic red underlining of iffy punctuation and such….that’s another thing. Like right here, the writing police don’t like my use of ellipses (I love ellipses) and my use of keyboard characters to make smiley faces and the like.

Call me an old-fashion writing hack if you want to, but I am of the old school that considered a well-done typed assignment paper or other submission to be part of the presentation. I still like to have certain spacing between sentences for purely esthetic reasons. I dislike the new grammar rules that eliminate double spacing at the end of the sentence, running the sentences together with just one space. I don’t appreciate the snarky comments like “…one space is better than two at the end of a sentence,” and “it is better not to have multiple characters at the end of a paragraph.”

Anyway, that’s my two-cents, and I’m sticking to it. haha so there…!:-)

hit the jackpot: my former closet

This and That

Guess what I found this morning while going through my closet? My old clothes from a couple of decades ago. These were my “good” work clothing that I wore to teach. Nice skirts and blazers, a decent dress or two.

I thought I shipped all this stuff off to the Goodwill long ago. It actually is like hitting the jackpot, finding my old wardrobe that (believe it or not) still in style. Truth be told, these outfits have likely been in and out of style several times over the years. In fact, my style-bible is still a current clothing catalog.

I know what they are going to say: “you’re wearing that again!?” My standard answer: “I’m old, I wear what I want.”

today’s project: curtain rod in the bedroom

This and That

Sounds simple, right? Just get some command strips and cheap hooks, and put it up there.

My prowess with a screw driver has never been one of my listed skills, and I hate following directions. I don’t need no stinking directions! Why do they have to be so talkative? Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Prepare the surface with alcohol? Really? Why: the walls are clean? And why not put the stick-up hook up over the old anchor things that remain since before the painters removed all the nails and fixtures.

Once the hooks were up there, the search for the blue curtain panel I have began. Of course the panel is not where I thought it was, and I refuse to buy another one. I wanted blue, but what the heck, I’ll settle for a nice gray sheer that I had. Then I spun the folded panels in the dryer, and loaded them on the curtain rod. Moved out the bed, and situated the step-stool, put the rod across the hooks, and voila! all that needed to be done was fix the gathers and it was done. I stepped back to admire the curtain, and the rod came crashing down. Back to the drawing board…

I’ll do it right next time, instead of giving the job a lick and a promise. Look at the directions 😉

censorship or common sense?

Books and Reading, Commentary, opinion, Sometimes, This and That

During my work in trying to reduce the volume of books from my inventory, I have thought a lot about censorship. I hereby state unequivocally that I have always been against censorship, and the current hysteria at certain school board meetings in our nation grates against my position. Having been a news reporter back in my day, I attended some pretty wild school board meetings. The parents who would show up to protest (almost anything) to do with teaching, teachers, or education in general. My favorites were objection to requiring girls to wear special gym clothes, which were always ugly; the great brew-ha-ha about students smoking; the length of boys’ hair; and the frantic issue of expelling pregnant girls from school.

So anyway, I won’t belabor the subject and cut right to my current thoughts.

I have a great number (several hundred) childrens’ books, most of which came from two of my main inventory sources, who were school teachers. I have decided not to donate “all” of the books to the Goodwill because of the current censorship craze some places in the United States. I also don’t want to list multiple-lots of random childrens’ literature, or even grade-level non-fiction or series books (I think they call them chapter books now.) Also, I do separate the occasional book that even I would prefer kids not have access to. Even these I would classify as “age appropriate.”

Six-year old girls don’t care about “how Susie got her boyfriend” but 11-year-old’s might. That’s what I call age-appropriate, but even that is subjective, and I am not comfortable deciding who gets to read what, and I would never in a million years support any legislative or otherwise action that would entitle random outraged parents to close down a board meetings.

Now when it comes to general fiction, or non-fiction, that’s another thing. When I come to certain titles that I believe to be subject to …let’s say… “parental supervision” I set them aside— no, never into the trash, just aside to be reconsidered or duly noted as a listing on ebay. I hasten to add that I never list any material that I consider porn, and on occasion a girly-magazine hidden in a Woman’s Day collection will hit the trash, censorship bedamned.